SEPTEMBER 2004
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Old Boy
Experiment Perilous
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Land of Plenty
Inside Job
The General
Vivacious Lady
A Woman’s Secret
Salvador Allende
Ae . . . Fond Kiss
Infernal Affairs
Wittgenstein
Paris
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)—9/30/04
Half a dozen times in the last several years, I’ve noticed this film directed by William Dieterle in TCM listings, and for one reason or another never made it a priority. I’ve never made it through a Victor Hugo novel, and this one, like many, could be linked to a chain and anchor a decent-sized skiff. As one of the 1930s adaptations of “great literature,” I expected it to be overblown, absurdly serious, wildly anachronistic, and lavishly sentimentalized. It was indeed all of those things, and yet . . . and yet . . .
The film has terrific energy, which admittedly it needs to blow past its shortcomings. We see the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in the very first shot, out of a window facing onto its square. The cathedral in that shot, as in numerous others in the movie, is a painted flat. Sheesh! Other times, they use a set for the front steps and the statuary in niches around the recessed doorways, with actual cardboard or plaster of Paris statues. From the top, in the bell towers, one looks out over the (set of the) city of Paris and notices that geography has been, shall we say, improved. But very quickly after that first shot, and a bit of fussy business involving the unbearable Harry Davenport as King Louis XI, we are plunged into a roistering carnival of the poor—players, buskers, cutpurses, and a contest by acclamation for the King of Fools. It’s lively, fun, and gets us through some more rough spots—Maureen O’Hara as a gypsy, which would be nice if gypsies came from Ireland and always had their lipstick in place, and the very young, very svelte Edmond O’Brien as the young poet Gringoire.
The King of Fools contest is won by Quasimodo, the hunchback bellringer of the cathedral, who is of course Charles Laughton in some rather remarkable makeup—not just for his back, but especially for his face, his actual right eye covered with what is meant to appear a mutated growth and a false eye appearing halfway down his face, his mouth full of gigantic teeth spaced like headstones in a cemetery. Quasimodo is deaf, can speak a little—a lot more as the film goes on—and Laughton gives him life, fire, and interest.
For the rest, Cedrick Hardwick plays the villainous Frollo despiccably enough to engage, and the film otherwise complies with the federal ordinance from the 1930s that no film with a six-figure budget could be produced with the appearance of Thomas Mitchell—here as Colpin, King of the Beggars. Dieterle, who emigrated from fimmaking in Germany at the beginning of the decade, specialized in rather slow-moving biopics starring Paul Muni (Pasteur, Juarez, Zola), handles big scenes well enough here, and Quasimodo saving Esmeralda from the gallows and then fending off the marauding invaders of the cathedral with huge blocks of stone and then molten metal are great fun. If you can bear the sanctimony and the imposition of nineteenth century political ideas on fifteenth-century Paris, you might get a kick out of it.
Paris
Old Boy (2003)—9/29/04
This amazing effort by director Pak Chan-Wook is the story of two intertwined quests for vengeance, although that—and practically any other summary generalization—is woefully inadequate. Even so, the critical word in the preceding sentence is “story.” This is not a film about something that happened, or will happen, or might happen. It’s a story, sneaking up on the territory of a yarn or a tale, but using recognizable human motivations and feelings, needs and drives, intelligence and blindness to tell itself. Like all stories in that sense, it requires that you take it as a story rather than a documentary, and it has a moral (in this case, all sins have both retributions and redemptions). The treatment, or presentation, or style is forceful, often brilliant and imaginative and original, but the story is what holds it all together.
A man, Woo, deftly presented in the quickest and most telling possible brushstrokes as a drunken slob, is kidnapped and held in captivity for fifteen years, during which time he is drugged, hypnotized (without his knowledge, of course), and never sees his captor(s). He does have television, which reveals to him that his wife has been murdered and he is suspected of the crime. Then, just as he has, Edmond Dantés-like, almost burrowed out of his apartment/cell, he is released. Naturally, his every thought is revenge. But his captor knows every move he is making, and communicates with him by a cell phone he has provided him. The captor toys with him, leading him here and there, to this lead, down that blind alley. Woo makes some smart guesses, gets closer, but the captor always has the upper hand. Along the way, the prisoner enlists the assistance of a young women, Mido. The clues are tantalizing, then start—with the assistance of surfacing memories portrayed in flashback—to materialize into a larger picture, until after many challenges, some of them brutal, there is a final confrontation.
That’s very abstract, I know, but to get any more concrete would be to compromise the story, which is delicious—overwrought in places, but then in a story like this, too much is barely enough. It’s the kind of excess De Palma is always trying to achieve and never knows how to contain, the kind of excess Hitchcock was always reaching for but afraid would offend either audiences or studios. (He let it go a little in Psycho, but only a little.) You really have to get into the story, and the superbly-played characters, to see just how right Pak makes everything.
To do that, though, requires a reasonably strong stomach. At the afternoon screening I attended, two young ladies, students of about eighteen or (tops) nineteen sitting behind me nearly lost their lunch during the scene where Woo eats a live squid and came even closer during a sequence in which teeth are pulled with a claw hammer (without novocaine, to be sure). But there is also an astounding sequence in which, armed only with his trusty hammer, he takes on something like twenty guys armed with baseball bats in a narrow hallway. The whole thing is shot like a side-scroller arcade game, and the pacing is close to genius level. At the end, our man prevails and walks out of the building—with a knife protruding from between his shoulder blades. QT, who I saw strolling—no strutting—down the Boulevard Saint-Germain a couple of weeks ago, and who chaired the grand jury at Cannes, must have been swooning. Yet while there is plenty of violence in the film, the worst violence seemed to me psychic, or emotional. Pak has said that he was really dealing with guilty consciences; the pain the characters put themselves and each through as memories are retrieved and the real mystery—the “why” rather than the “who” of the kidnapping, the wife’s murder, and a very great deal more—is greater than anything physically inflicted.
The long, complicated resolution can’t even be broached here without ruining the film, so all I can say is: retribution, redemption of a sort (not to forget self-mutilation). Choi Min-Sik, as the prisoner, and Kang Hae-Jong, as Mido, get top marks. For a review that takes in more of Pak’s work than I can, see the extremely talented and knowledgeable filmbrain.
Paris
Experiment Perilous (1944)—9/27/04
Jacques Tourneur came to America with his film director father and followed him into the industry. For most of the 1930s, he cranked out shorts (“The Romance of Radium,” “The Man in the Barn”) and made the jump to B features in 1939, when he was thirty-five. Along the way, he made the acquaintance of Val Lewton, and when Lewton was appointed head of RKO’s new horror film unit in the early 1940s, he put Tourneur to work. The results were Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and Leopard Man (1944)—superior B’s , but B’s all the same. Experiment Perilous isn’t exactly a horror film: “gothic” may capture the flavor better. It certainly deserves to be called perfect, as in: “perfectly awful.”
The plot, to stretch a word, has something to do with strange goings on in a Murray Hill mansion circa 1903. It’s all utterly preposterous, with no particular motivation and characterization by insinuation rather than writing or performing. Paul Lukas plays an older rich guy with the inevitable younger wife, here Hedy Lamarr. George Brent is the doctor who becomes involved with them, smells a rat, nearly screws things up, but comes out OK. Lukas, who was born in Budapest, is passed off as Austrian born, so the accent makes a sort of sense. Lamarr, in fact Austrian born, still has a thick overlay of Viennese consonants; she plays a young woman born in Vermont. Brent . . . well, Brent doesn’t really play anything, and never did (with the possible exception of the doctor in The Spiral Staircase [1947], which I vaguely remember as his one decent performance). He was in a gazillion movies from the early thirties into the early fifties, almost always as a male lead. He wasn’t movie star handsome, he put on more than a few pounds in his early forties, he was unable give a clean line reading for love nor money. The man couldn’t even walk right: he appears to have either a severe malfunction somewhere in the groin or to be suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. With no story and a laughable cast, Tourneur fiddled with lighting, but I think he gave it up as a lost cause pretty early on.
French film audiences are as a rule pretty tolerant of even dreadful films: they will look for the pearl hiding in the oyster, even if it’s only one shot, one line. But here, when the Brent and Lukas characters duke it out at the end, the double for Lukas looked more like Hedy Lamarr, and the house erupted in laughter. For the record, Tourneur made a slightly larger budget feature in Canyon Passage (1946), which had Dana Andrews, Suzan Hayward, and the only man ever to challenge Brent and Donald Wood for worst Hollywood actor, Brian Donleavy. Then he did a single noir masterpiece, Out of the Past (1947), with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, thereafter subsiding into the B’s and television.
Paris
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)—9/24/04
If there is an American film of the postwar years that might even remotely deserve categorizing as film noir, you can safely wager that the French will track it down and run it in a revival house. After all, they invented the term. There is an Otto Preminger festival in a Latin Quarter cinema, and it features this noirish effort by Otto, actually intended to make some money (which his films hadn’t been doing for a while) by recapturing the magic of Laura (1944). Sidewalk reunites Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, and again he is a cop who falls in love with a woman involved in a case he’s working (since the woman is Tierney, who can blame him?). There’s no Clifton Webb to add arch counterbalance, but there is a truckload of top-notch support players from the early postwar ear: Gary Merrill (who in the same year would appear in All About Eve with his wife, Bette Davis), Karl Malden, Tom Tully, Neville Brand (as, what else, a punk), Harry von Zell for God’s sake (long time announcer on the George Burns and Gracie Allen radio and then television shows), and even Craig Stevens, television’s future Peter Gunn, here in a pretty-boy pompadour.
But the movie doesn’t work. The story, about a bad good guy cop, gets him in some really hot water, and a real noir treatment would have done more than bathe him in dark shadows and expressionist camera angles. If he were as amoral as he appears for most of the film, he wouldn’t suddenly turn smarmy at the end. Instead, he would indeed have taken what Richard Nixon liked to call “the easy way out,” grabbed the girl and promotion, and brushed aside that he had murdered someone, however “accidentally.” (Ben Hecht’s script loads that murder with so much unbelievable countervailing weight that it nearly tips over.) To make matters worse, Andrews never did hard-boiled very well. Although born in Mississippi, he was aces at milk-fed midwestern good guy roles, and his very best was in as the well-meaning sergeant Tyne in Lewis Milestone’s highly stylized and highly effective war film, A Walk in the Sun (1945). When he juts his jaw at Merrill and sneers at Brand, it doesn’t scare anyone. Noir has to be dark in more than photography. This doesn’t get it done. It’s interesting historically, though. It’s pre-Miranda, so suspects, and even material witnesses, have zero rights and recourse—sort of like life under the Patriot Act.
Paris
Land of Plenty (2004)—9/23/04
I have the sense that Wim Wenders’s new film has not yet opened commercially in the States, but after seeing it Thursday evening, I still cruised the web looking for reactions. I was disturbed to find that the few pieces on it—based apparently on its appearance at the Venice Film Festival and a few special screenings—turned almost entirely on the question, Is this film anti-American? This is the new litmus test for all entertainment that has any political reference points, and “anti-American” also seems to encompass anything that is critical of official American policy or the post-9/11 surge of aggressive patriotism (customarily taking the form of waving patriotic symbols). It’s the same sort of advance lather that’s being worked up to greet Philip Roth’s new novel, The Plot Against America, to be published in a week or so, even though Roth has written in The New York Times that he began to shape the novel in December 2000, and is writing about a period in American history some sixty years ago.
Wenders has returned repeatedly to America and American subjects over the years, and his critical observations have generally been accompanied by sympathetic perceptions and a certain admiration. Land of Plenty, its title (and much of its tone) drawn from the Leonard Cohen song which covers the final sequence of the film, is one of the first attempts from anywhere to give serious consideration to our post-9/11 predicament. As I saw the film, it does so by presenting us with two very different but ultimately congruent versions of ourselves. First, there is Paul Jeffries, a fiftyish veteran of Vietnam’s Special Forces, a man unhinged by the war and by Agent Pink (the more toxic parent of Agent Orange) who had only begun to settle down when the September atrocity struck. Now, his love of country and his pride in defending it with his life have sent him far off the tracks. He has appointed himself a private homeland security force, cruising about Los Angeles in his battered old van which is crammed with cameras, microphones, a laptop, and a .45—looking for, and therefore finding, things that look suspicious. To Paul, nothing looks more suspicious than a man wearing a turban.
But there is also his sister’s daughter, Lana, twenty, the child of missionaries who has grown up in Africa and the middle east, and has lately been living on the West Bank, where she has a Palestinian boy friend. Lana has seen the world, and the breadth of sufferings in it, seen how people view the US who live in countries most Americans could not find on a map. But she is also deeply spiritual, praying often and sincerely to a personal, providential God. She has come back to the US to work in a Los Angeles homeless mission run by a friend of her father’s, but mainly to deliver a letter from her mother to Paul, her uncle.
The way in which Paul and Lana connect imposes rather severe demands upon our power to suspend disbelief, but I don’t think Wenders is interested in either the plausibility of orthodox narrative or even in building conventionally believable characters. He is presenting temperaments, dimensions of our national personality, and letting them intermingle. And he lets them run free in an environment not customarily made central in our own films. The Los Angeles we see is mostly one of massive homelessness, whose hunger and despair are as much a part of the landscape as the freeways and the skyscrapers.
This kind of enterprise depends heavily on the central performances, and here Wenders has chosen well. John Diehl is Paul. He’s a face you recognize but can’t quite place, perhaps because he’s never had a film role beyond bit part or supporting character, and then rarely in big films (he passed through Pearl Harbor and Wenders used him in The End of Violence). His paranoid, driven character who sees sleeper cells everywhere and one-man submarines lurking under tarpaulins made me uncomfortable, nervous, a little frightened. I could have done without the obligatory Vietnam nightmare, but for the rest his work was mesmerizing. The film is worth seeing for him alone, though there are other reasons as well. Michelle Williams brought to Lana a sweetness, simplicity, and believable innocence that must be extremely difficult to portray convincingly in a post-cynical age of sneer and irony. She made it work.
In the end, with Cohen—North America’s answer to Edith Piaf, the voice of our yearnings, our consciences, our fears—on the soundtrack, Paul and Lana come to understand each other and to accept that they need each other. She needs his strength and protection (at least when he’s calmed down somewhat, as he does after at long last after seeing the folly of his thinking and also after opening his sister’s letter); he needs her quiet insistence that they should stop talking and listen for the voices of 9/11’s dead, because they would hear that the victims don’t want any others killed in their name. And he also needs to take up the responsibility of caring for her, rather than chasing phantoms.
Wenders doesn’t resolve, or try to resolve, our current dilemmas. He tries instead to get us to look closely at ourselves from one point of view, to see what we’re doing to ourselves and others, to incorporate other perspectives, and he wraps it all in a sort of lament--just like Cohen's song--for our country, with its incredible riches and its incredible poverty, material and spiritual. Like all his work that I’ve seen, there’s quirkiness and idiosyncrisy in it, some rough spots to get over. But I can’t get the film out of my mind, and that’s as strong a recommendation as I can make for taking in what the man has to say.
Paris
Inside Job (2004)--9/22/04
Nicolas Winding Refn is Danish, educated in New York, and the director of three or four films of which I’ve never heard. Well, so what: this one had John Turturro, so can it go that far wrong? In a word: yes. Turturro plays Harry Caine, a security guard at a Wisconsin mall, whose wife was recently one of two victims in a shooting at the mall’s underground parking lot. Naturally, Refn has watched a little too much Antonioni and DePalma, so we get a lot of reviewing of the mall’s video systems and scratching for clues, blurry photos pinned to the wall. Henry James was addressing writers when he advised, “Tell the dream, lose the reader,” but it’s a good guideline for directors too. But hey, Refn knows a lot more than Henry James about storytelling and plunges—deeply—into Harry’s (rather predictable) dreams, hallucinations, imaginings.
I suppose you could say that what I’m about to do is spoiling, but Refn got at this film first—along with Hubert Selby, Jr., who collaborated on the script with him—he spoiled it good and proper before I came along. Probes of Harry’s psyche, of which there are a number, are prefaced by black and red pulsing abstractions which look like those visualization of fractals we used to see fifteen or twenty years ago. They go on forever. Long before we get to the last one, it’s pretty plain that all of this is going on in Harry’s mind, and when the killer shoots him toward the end, there’s no killer and no shooting. Ho hum.
Along the way, which seems much lengthier than the film’s actual 91 minutes, Refn forces a style of massive pauses which makes Pinter’s work look like His Girl Friday (1940). Everyone seems to be on ‘ludes or massive doses of Valium. For instance:
“What was his name?” Very long pause.
“His name?” Longer pause.
“Yes.” Practically intermission—plenty of time to go out for pizza.
“I don’t know.”
It’s slightly jolting to discover that Turturro has been around for twenty-five years now; his first role was uncredited, in Raging Bull. He didn’t make much of an impression on me until Five Corners (1985), a pretty fair little indie with Jody Foster and Tim Robbins, and especially Do the Right Thing (1987), still Spike Lee’s best. There, his playing of Pino was so convincing that I thought, Oh my, this young man is going to get typed as working-class ethnic—a sort of outer-borough redneck—and never get another kind of part. How pleased I was to see that Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Quiz Show (1994), A Box of Moonlight (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), Cradle Will Rock (1999), and The Luzhin Defense (2000), to name some of my favorite roles, proved me wrong.
Paris
The General (1927)—9/18/04
In Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2004), the young American and the young Frenchman have one of their passionate, well-informed, and revealing arguments, this one about the superiority of Chaplin (the French view) or Keaton (the American preference). Chaplin has the vote of posterity, of course, and as I have begun to work my way through the eight-DVD collection of his features and many shorts, it’s hard to deny him the nod. It’s a towering achievement. But don’t think that gives anyone the right to dismiss Buster. I admire Chaplin’s work, of course, but I really like Keaton’s. Work like Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1925), and the great run of five films he had from 1926 through 1928—The Battling Butler (1926), College (1927), The General (1927), Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), and The Camerman (1928)—will stand up to the best of silent comedy. He had a hand in directing all of these, often uncredited, and generally worked on the scripts as well.
The pinnacle of his achievement was The General. His success had earned him the right to a big budget (for the time) and considerable freedom. Over the years, it has shown up on television now and then, abundant in its riches, but the small screen cramps its visual style, which is expansive, and a poor print was distracting. Now, MK2, the French film distributors and producers, have used advanced techniques to remove spots and scratches, restore the original contrasts, get the movement more in synch with modern twenty-four-frame-a-second technology, and have also added a new orchestral sound track by the Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, which is good when it’s good but does rather go on.
My own preference for Keaton over Chaplin is that Charlie, who was hopelessly sentimental, also never passed up an opportunity to do schtick. Often, it’s a delight—think of the absurd and very funny singing sequence toward the end of Modern Times—but it’s still schtick. Keaton avoided that temptation, if he ever had it, preferring to get laughs out of situations tightly integrated into the story. Essentially, he did character comedies, and I find them especially rewarding. In The General, set in Georgia during the Civil War, young Johnny Gray is the engineer on a train called “The General,” and when he goes to enlist for the Confederacy and is turned down (he’s more valuable on the railroad), his girlfriend tells him she won’t speak to him until she sees him in uniform. He wanders back to the tracks in a funk and takes a seat on the connecting rod between the big front wheels. Someone gets in the locomotive and starts it up, and it creeps off, lifting Johnny up and down, up and down. It’s a funny shot, but even more a beautiful one, because Johnny never notices what’s happening, so sunk in sadness is he, and the movement also mimics the highs and lows of his relationship with his girlfriend.
A good half of the film is devoted to a chase, and Keaton gets more out of it while keeping himself working within a strict story line than you can imagine. But there’s also a spectacular train wreck, a big battle scene, and every sort of reversal. Keaton got the sobriquet of The Great Stone Face because he never cracked a smile, but here nothing could be more appropriate: Johnny is a man on a mission (get back his stolen train, get back his girl), thoroughly applied to business, and refusing to relent until he’s successful. I’m assuming the new print will be released soon in the states; if it does, make a special effort—even if you’ve seen the film. Guaranteed to satisfy.
In the mid-1930s, Keaton took a big contract with MGM, and of course they reamed him, taking away control and essentially extinguishing his creative spark (although booze played a substantial role as well). After a long string of forgettables, and World War II, he was limited to bit parts and cameos (although he did get the role of Calvero’s partner in Chaplin’s Limelight [1952]), the last of which was in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), which was released just after his death.
Paris
Vivacious Lady (1938)—9/17/04
It’s not the most original plot in history, but George Stevens manages to wring every last laugh out of it. College professor from New England school comes to New York, falls in love over night with nightclub chanteuse; they marry, take the morning train back to Old Sharon, where he suddenly finds it extremely difficult to tell all to his imperious father, president of the college, and mother, sweet but with a “weak heart” (she requires smelling salts at the slightest upset). And that’s the story. Every conceivable barrier springs up between the professor and his parents, most of them erected by the college president, some by circumstances. Not much to it, but the scenes are mostly played well, and sometimes brilliantly.
Ginger Rogers is Francey, the singer smitten with her professor, James Stewart. The college president is Charles Coburn, who does a little bit too much of the dropping-the-monocle business, but is otherwise all right. (In one scene, from the nightclub, Stewart is calling his father from the coat check phone. He turns to the coat check girl and says, “He’s the president, you know.” She says, “Oh yeah? Then what’s Roosevelt.” Nice look at academic self-referentiality.) Rogers always had a terrific way with snappy dialogue, and if you ever get to watch a terrific little B movie from the end of her career, Tight Spot (1955), pounce. Stewart was always good at comedy, but here he also exudes come romantic charm, and they pair well. But the real joy is is mother, played by the seemingly always late-middle-aged Beulah Bondi, who demonstrates a smile that will melt you on a face that doesn’t seem to give up smiles easily, an enormous charm, an ability to let down her starchy exterior and shake her butt. Literally: she, Rogers, and James Ellison, who plays Stewart’s best friend and cousin, do “The Big Apple,” and Rogers gamely tones down her steps so as not to show up her fellow players—she was, after all, the greatest female dancer in film musical history, Cyd Charisse or no Cyd Charisse. James Ellison, by the way, got his start as the young, impulsive sidekick in the Hopalong Cassidy movies of the early-to-mid 1930s, essentially the same role that Clint Eastwood had in the “Rawhide” series of the early and middle 1960s. Needless to say, it didn’t take Ellison quite as far as it took Eastwood.
In addition, there are three of the great ones who filled small roles in 1930s comedies but who, when you saw their name in the opening credits, guaranteed that you would have a good time. Grady Sutton: the chunky botany instructor here, he has a great moment flirting with Rogers, another when, in front of the class, Stewart says to him, “Mr. Culpepper, I believe you are from Texas.” Sutton stands before answering, and says, “I am, and bless her.” Franklin Pangborn: liberated from his customary department store floorwalker role, he becomes a receptionist in a woman’s hotel, and strolls off with every scene he’s in. Willie Best: consigned to the sorts of roles reserved for black men in the ‘30s (waiters, porters, busboys, etc.), he gets involved in an indescribable scene between Bondi and Rogers which adds just the right condiment to the dish.
Not available on DVD or VCR, I’m told, but once in a (great) while popping up on TCM. It’s not The More the Merrier (1944), Stevens’s best comedy, but it’s worth ninety minutes.
Paris
A Woman’s Secret (1949)—9/16/04
A lot of film lovers go all squishy when Nicholas Ray’s name comes up and start talking about Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without A Cause (1955), and 55 Days at Peking (1963) as though they were The Searchers (1956), Fist in the Pocket (I Pugni i Tasci, 1965), and 1900 (1976), three films of roughly comparable subject matter but vastly, incomparably superior achievement. It is this sort of sentimentality that apparently convinced some distributor to unearth one of Ray’s early RKO films, along with a couple of others, by Jacques Tourneur and George Stevens, spring for new prints, and re-release them. I saw the Ray, A Woman’s Secret (1949), which was weak for the most part, but with a couple of redeeming moments.
It’s a drawing room comedy wrapped in a murder mystery, but the wrapping is so thin and predictable from the first few minutes of the film that all the interest goes to the comedy: we know exactly how the “mystery” is going to be resolved, but the snappy repartée, scripted by Herman J. Mankiewicz (who wrote Citizen Kane), keeps us hanging in there. The patter is delivered by some real pros, such as Melvyn Douglas, Jay C. Flippen, Mary Phillips, and Emory Parnell (who as a desk sergeant encapsulates Central Casting’s conception of Irish Copness). We also have Gloria Graham, Ray’s wife at the time, doing her (oft-repeated) bad girl number and Victory Jory, only a few years past all those down-market westerns as the black hat guy, cast as, well, lovers. Hooo, boy. Finally, there’s Maureen O’Hara, as the female lead, and utterly unconvincing. She never did anything I’ve seen worth paying for that wasn’t under John Ford’s direction, this included.
It was Ray’s second film, after diddling around in New York theater in the 1930s, and he was still learning his craft. But while he got better at things fumbled here—story holes, muffed master shots, details that get stated one way and contradicted a couple of scenes later—I’m not convinced he ever got all that good. Entertainment Weekly, in one of those supremely meaningless lists a few years back, ranked him as the thirty-sixth greatest director of all time. I’m reminded of a fellow I worked with at a large New York bank about twenty years ago. He was an upper-middle-level executive who was, how shall I put this, excused after perhaps a dozen years of service. He took a job across the Hudson with a big Newark insurance company, and upon departing bragged to his colleagues, “I’m going over as their Number Seventeen Man.”
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The Chase (1966)—9/14/04
For a brief period in the late 1960s, from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) through the following year’s Alice’s Restaurant to Little Big Man (1970), Arthur Penn fever was running high. It broke shortly thereafter, and he has made only a sprinkling of films, none of them memorable for excellence. The Chase may be his worst, though, a muddled mess with almost nothing to recommend it. To begin with, it really isn’t about a chase—nobody really goes after escaped con whom everyone calls “Bubber” except his wife, who calls him “Bubba.” Don’t ask. Instead, the film is about the conflicts, jealousies, racism, sexual infidelities, and power structure of a smallish Texas town. These are played out in excruciating detail, with rednecks in business suits a’ whompin’ on black folk, and black folk bearing it all with non-violent resolve. A sheriff gets in between, earns himself a fat lip and worse, but triumphs. There’s star power here, but it blinks dimly: Brando is the sheriff, dull and lifeless and with a hoked up accent; Redford is Bubber in a role that was supposed to make him a star, but mostly featured him running through swamps, so he had to wait until his Sundance turn a few years later; Jane Fonda is his wife, in another sex-kitten role from her earlier years; and there’s Robert Duvall as a wimp, the reassuring Angie Dickinson as the sheriff’s wife, Janice Rule as a slut, and the wildly miscast E.G. Marshall as a Texas oil and land tycoon. Take all steps to avoid.
Paris
Salvador Allende (2004)—9/9/04
Patricio Guzmán is a Chilean filmmaker who (as I understand it) went into exile after the 1973 coup and has made some films about the Pinochet dictatorship, and now this one about the Allende regime and coup. It’s made with passion and devotion, and there are things in it that moved me, so I hate to come down negatively, but I must. Three reasons, in ascending order of importance: (1) it’s too long by about fifteen or twenty minutes, which risks sapping important moments of its power; (2) it’s vague about the contemporary situation—that is, he has a Michael Moore-like scene where he tries to interview people in present-day Santiago about the September 11, 1973, takeover, and they all refuse to come on camera, but then he’s allowed to film inside the presidential palace and the official presidential residence, so it’s hard to say how squeamish or controlling today’s authorities are about Chile’s history; (3) most serious, he drops the ball when it comes to getting responsibility for the coup clear and unmistakable. I’ll stick to the last point, after saying that those touching scenes were fairly powerful—the newsreel footage from 1970-73 showing the authentic adulation of Allende by the Chilean people, or at least the ones photographed, and the wrenching interviews with old United Party militants who blamed themselves and their comrades for failing to come to Allende’s aid on September 11 and, I think, are suffering serious survivors’ guilt.
Unquestionably, significant parts of the Chilean economic elites, upper middle classes, and (needless to say) officer corps were dead set against Allende’s land reforms, nationalizations, and redistribution of wealth. (There is one particularly effective scene, historical footage of a landlord—reluctantly, he admits—turning over his land to the peasants in 1973. The stunned beamings on their faces made the overlong film worth it.) Castro himself told Allende, as Guzmán notes, that if he didn’t clean out the military and put his own people in, he would be overthrown. But would the military have moved if it hadn’t known, in commitments of one syllable words, that the US not only wanted Allende out, Nixon insisted on it. There are several interview clips here with Edward Korry, who was ambassador to Chile during the years under review. He is engagingly candid about the fact that the CIA sent weapons and money by diplomatic pouch to Chile in 1970 to be used in killing pro-Allende General Schneider, but later launches into the tired old refrain, completely refuted decades ago, about Allende wanting to institute a “Marxist-Leninist regime.” That’s a lie, and so what if it were true? It was their country. But not for long. Allende’s death and, more important, the death of Chilean social democracy, was somehow overlooked at the tongue-bath given Nixon by all those ex-presidents back in the 1990s, and I suspect it won’t be mentioned at Kissinger’s obsequies (which can’t come soon enough for me).
The US has been treating Central and South America as private possessions for very nearly 200 years—since the Monroe Doctrine. Nothing lasts long there that doesn’t conform to US reigning ideology and corporate interests, which have for a very long time seen the rest of this hemisphere as a source of cheap raw materials and a nice market for US-produced goods. It’s a stunningly arrogant record, and Salvador Allende owed it to its eponymous hero and his supporters to tell it like it is.
Paris
Ae. . .Fond Kiss(2004)—9/7/04
I first became aware of Ken Loach in 1973, when a friend suggested I show Kes (1969) in a film series I was running at the University of Missouri. The film bombed—people walked out in groups—but I loved it. Loach was born in 1936 in England, and has made more than twenty films for theatrical release and a few dozen more for British television. I don’t know what’s more impressive about him, his talent as a filmmaker or his integrity and dedication to his principles. His films are about social issues from a gentle but firm, and in no way shrill, left-wing perspective: poverty, class conflict, racism, bigotry and intolerance, religious persecution, union-busting, alcoholism and its consequences, homelessness, revolutionary politics—all the things that make the world go round. Almost all set among the working classes, a novelty for viewers in the states, who are encouraged to wallow in their classless fantasy by the lords of movies and television. But Loach has found his subject, and he sticks to it, God love him. I’ve seen roughly a dozen of his films and liked them all. The easiest to pick up in the US (by now, you should have grasped that US distributors are not all that enthusiastic about buying Loach films, and although I wasn’t in the country, I gather that the Republican National Convention didn’t show any during their sessions) are the utterly glorious Land and Freedom (1995), a heart-rending story about a British volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, starring the very, very talented Ian Hart, and Bread and Roses (2000), about organizing immigrant workers in Los Angeles, starring Adrien Brody. These and others occasionally show up on television film channels. Seize.
Kes, still one of my favorite films by anyone, deals with a desperately poor working-class family in the north of England at the end of the sixties. The boy captures and adopts a kestrel (a variety of hawk), trains it, gets the only spark of happiness available to him from his relationship with Kes, only to have his brute of an old brother kill it. End of film. Loach is famous for working in dialects of the UK where the people don’t sound much like Jeremy Irons or Diana Rigg. The people in Kes are hard to understand (in Riff Raff [1990], Loach used so many impenetrable local dialects that he was obliged to issue the film with subtitles in the UK). Loach has a clever device to get around the problem. In the film’s first scene, he looks over the shoulder of the protagonist-boy as he reads a comic strip to himself aloud. We see the words on the page, we hear him pronounce them, we get the idea. Within a couple of minutes, we’re in the groove and there’s no problem.
Ae . . . Fond Kiss is his newest, and a beauty. Set, like Loach's My Name is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002), in Glasgow—another slightly challenging dialect—it tells a story of religious, cultural, and racial complexity. Glasgow has a Pakistani community going back to just shortly after the Indian-Pakistani community (1947), so there are full-blooded Pakistanis there speaking English in a Glaswegian accent and feeling themselves fully Pakistani, fully Scottish, fully Muslim, fully Christian—and rabid Glasgow Ranger (football [soccer]) supporters. Casim, mid-twentyish, is the only son of three children born to a Pakistani immigrant who as made good running a little grocery story. In one sense, Casim is fully westernized (he is a DJ in a club, with aspirations of running his own operation); in another, is remains part of the old culture (he has accepted an arranged marriage with an extremely beautiful cousin, set only weeks in the future). His father, a man for whom love and control are opposite sides of the same coin, is building a house for Casim and his bride-to-be. It is in the side yard of his own house, where he lives with his wife and other two children. He plans out everything himself, hires the workers, and sets up this little bungalow, which of course is also a prison. Casim will marry as the family has arranged, and he will live as a part of the family. Then Casim meets a music teacher at the school attended by his younger sister. The teacher is Irish—blonde, attractive, independent, sexy. Kaboom!
There’s little point in trying to summarize the story thereafter, except to say this: Loach isn’t big on action peaks and thriller pacing. I found the film absorbing, but it’s full of stops and starts that mirror life itself: indecision, quarrels, estrangements, reconciliations, all more than once. What’s important is the Loach harbors great sensitivity toward his characters, an ability to find the emotional center of his scenes, the patience to let a story work its way through its to’s and fro’s, and a subtle visual style. He also has the courage to face every issue that naturally arises: religious intolerance (there’s an RC priest here who will make your hair stand on end), hidden as well as overt racism, the pull of cultures the characters don’t want to have pulling on them—but do anyway. He’s not afraid to let his characters be weak and then change their minds, or be strong and then change their minds. These seem as much like real people as you’re likely to find in a movie. Atta Yaqub, apparently a non-professional (at least, this is his first film) is Casim, and Eva Birthistle is Roisin Hanlon, the music teacher. She’s been around a bit, but she’s not to be taken for granted: the lady has explosive screen presence.
Paris
Infernal Affairs (2002)--9/5/04
Infernal Affairs, the sappy English title of a thoughtful, tightly-rigged, and mercilessly entertaining film, is usually tagged as a Hong Kong police story, which puts you in mind of John Woo and his woonabees. But director Andrew Lau has used the genre as a springboard rather than a formula limiting his choices. There are cops and triads, but there are also issues of identity lost, risked, and found, the grip of the past, and the ambiguities likely to attend redemption.
At the beginning, Sam, a triad chief, dispatches several young charges into important new jobs. For Ming, that means attending the police academy and pursuing a career as a mole. Meanwhile, the police organized crime unit chooses junior police officer Yan to go under cover with major crime organizations, a career path which begins with petty thuggery and finally leads him into Sam’s triad. Ten years pass. Ming advances by dint of talent, and stays loyal to Sam. Yan desperately wants out, but his boss—the only one in the department who knows his real identity—persuades him to stay around for a few weeks on “one last job,” a phrase that in crime dramas carries heavy omens.
Sam sets up a big drug buy from some Thai wholesalers. It’s an elaborate process, with all sorts of cutouts and fail-safes, and the police have the whole thing blanketed thanks to Yan, by now a trusted figure in Sam’s gang. But Sam also knows what the police are up to, because Ming—at the center of the investigation—is keeping him informed. The entire sequence, lasting perhaps twenty minutes, is as gripping as thrillers get; each mole is trying to get the critical information to his side without being caught. The cops arrest Sam but they can’t hold him. Even so, both Sam and his counterpart, Inspector Wong (who runs Yan and supervises Ming), conclude that each side has infiltrated the other. The race is on to see who can reveal whom first, and it’s absorbing every frame of the way. If you’re a nail biter, wear gloves.
The antagonists are neatly paired, and given more than the one character note that’s customary in policiers. Ming is smart, quick thinking, and enjoys his work: he’s an effective policeman who rises through merit. He has a taste for the good life, as we see in his new apartment and the way he furnishes it (do HK policemen make this kind of money?). He has a sweet and interesting girl friend, who clearly doesn’t hang around just to listen to his fancy new stereo—she sees something in the man, and so can we. In other words, Ming has everything that Yan should have and could have had were it not for his professional dedication. He gets a glimpse of what he missed when he bumps into a former girlfriend, from before the undercover days, now married and with a child.
Apparently, professional reviewers have all signed a binding pledge to mention Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) when reviewing Infernal Affairs. They’re both big city cops-and-crooks stories with lots of close calls, a number of brutal killings (actually more of them in Heat), a couple of haywire love affairs, and a villain who can scare the bejabbers out of you. While I admire Heat, Infernal Affairs does not suffer by comparison. The film is beautifully shot—director Lau doubled as cinematographer—although the editing now and then calls unnecessary attention to itself. Hong Kong emerges as hard, shiny, dangerous, the sort of environment from which violence and crime emerge as naturally as the skyscrapers. Where Lau’s film surpasses Mann’s is in its moral skepticism. Heat’s antagonists advance inexorably toward a fated conclusion; it’s unimaginable anyone would have been surprised by the resolution. But Ming and Yan have clouded their identities, and Ming especially is faced with increasingly difficult choices. We learn he has a conscience, but also see that every path chosen is the one most likely to secure his future and his secret. The several twists through which Infernal Affairs takes us in its closing minutes aren’t trickery; they reflect the fact that the bundle of uncertainties to which we give the name “life” can go one way or another at almost any time. To get them to go your way, you may have to do some unpleasant things.
Andy Lau (not to be confused with director Andrew Lau) plays Ming—who, to compound the confusion, when he takes on his new policeman identity, is known as Officer Lau. He shows us into the nooks and beneath the trapdoors of Ming’s personality, and we feel we know a complex human being (as opposed to what used to be known as the good bad guy, or the bad good guy). The estimable Tony Leung is Yan, and he’s even more shaded, a man not only at risk but in pain, yet who finds love in an improbable place—but can he hold onto it? Special mention must also be made of Eric Tsang as Sam, the mob boss, a man whose quiet demeanor masks constant distrust, suspicion, and violence. When his eyes are telling you a joke and inviting you to join his playfulness, his brain is measuring you for a violent end.
Paris
Wittgenstein (1993)—9/3/04
Derek Jarman is one of those directors whose films are more about his own artistic efforts and effects than about their subjects. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and Fellini made a rather impressive career out of the same approach. But it does require a coherent point of view, and that can be harder to develop than it sounds. Ludwig Wittgenstein is an irresistible figure for dramatization (he appears in any number of novels and is at the center of a recent improbable success, Wittgenstein’s Poker [2002], an entertaining journalistic account by John Edmonds and John Eidinow of a famous incident that took place at Cambridge in the 1940s). He was brilliant, rich, eccentric, conscientious, cruel, adored and emulated, hated and ridiculed, a closeted gay, the twentieth century’s most famous philosopher, the man who started the long vogue of linguistic analysis. A Viennese by birth (he shared a history teacher in school at Linz with Adolf Hitler, although Hitler and Wittgenstein never met), he went as a graduate student to Cambridge University to study under Bertrand Russell. During World War I, he patriotically (and in part to punish himself for all his advantages) enlisted in the Austrian army and fought rather than take a cushy desk job his wealth and connections could surely have arranged. At the front, he wrote his only published work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which proceeds by an accumulation of mostly short, pungent, opaque propositions. He returned to Cambridge to teach, and to try to make sense out of his life. He died after World War II of prostate cancer.
Jarman takes all of this and presents it on a sound stage with very small lighted areas surrounded by complete darkness, a rather nice figure for the small circle of light Wittgenstein thought he cast in an impenetrably black world. The scenes are reasonably short, with minimal sets, and the whole thing has the feel of a theatrical review with a few dozen tableaux vivants. Jarman recognizes none of the constraints of traditional film realism. Although all the costumes are in period, a very young Wittgenstein and an adult Wittgenstein appear at the same time, and one character is a visiting Martian. Yet none of this really jars. Jarman had great panache, believed in his style, and it’s not difficult to share his belief.
But he seems never to have decided where the center of his film resided. At times, it is in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which was opaque, full of paradoxes and gnomic utterances (“The world is the only thing that is the case”), but constantly shifting. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, he changes his mind. At other times, Jarman seems more interested in Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, which he could not deny and could not accept. (Jarman himself was gay, often dealt with gay themes and dilemmas, and died from complications of AIDS the year after the film was released.) And again still, Wittgenstein’s relentless and often brutal perfectionism, his refusal to tolerate other points of view and the limits of his own intelligence, as formidable as it was, seem to be the heart of Jarman’s story. It ends on this note, or almost, because after Wittgenstein’s death, we see him alone in a large cage, looking into a smaller cage holding what appears to be a bird. These dimensions never really knit together. I’m not suggesting that Jarman should have made his film about just one side of Wittgenstein, but that he doesn’t serve the audience well by weighting everything more or less equally.
The adult Wittgenstein is well played by Karl Johnson, and Tilda Swinton plays against type as Lady Ottoline Morell, a florid mistress to the famous, including Bertie Russell. But Michael Gough is all wrong as Russell, too much the gentle, unflappable don, whereas Russell himself was excitable, snappish, as much the rival of Wittgenstein as his benevolent patron. Best of all is John Quentin as John Maynard Keynes: sensible, skeptical, wise, and he gets the film’s best line. Wittgenstein has more than once expressed the desire to go to the Soviet Union to work in a factory, among common people. Keynes tells him that’s daft, the country is a giant labor camp.
“What’s wrong with a labor camp?” asks an indignant Wittgenstein.
“Nothing,” says Keynes, “except they shoot you if you don’t work.”
Wittgenstein counters by saying, all right, then, I’ll move to Ireland.
“Over there,” says Keynes, “they shoot you if you do work.”
